Word: french
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...sober French reaction marks how the nation has evolved towards a freer market system under European Union rules, even as it struggles to preserve parts of its vaunted welfare state. Over the past decade, millions of French citizens became first-time shareholders following a huge wave of privatizations, the bulk of them carried out in the late 1990s by a Socialist-led government. Meanwhile, once-modest executive compensation - long cited as proof of France's more egalitarian approach - has skyrocketed in recent years; in 2007 alone, pay for French top executives soared by an estimated 58%, according to the French...
France has long liked to see itself as the other, non-American model for organizing a modern economy, with a rich tradition of exalting the state and disdaining "Anglo-Saxon"-style capitalism. So it would be completely de rigueur for the French to smile smugly over Washington's French-style intervention in the financial markets. But by and large, they're not. For however suddenly the U.S. government has embraced the Gallic tradition of nationalization, the French economy has itself been slowly and surely becoming très américaine. As a result, the impulse to utter "I told...
...France's economy, companies and employees have embraced a lot more of the globalized, free-market practices than people here may have suspected," says Jacques Mistral, head of economic research for the French Institute on International Relations in Paris. "France has been doing a pretty good job getting with the global program after all. But this crisis is a reminder that French financial institutions - and the wider French economy - are exposed to external forces, including those in a U.S. system we often criticize as reckless...
...French leftists have long slammed the U.S. economic system as "savage capitalism," and many a right-wing Gaullist has been prone to agree: in 2005 then French President famously said that "ultra-liberalism" - French parlance for the unbridled marketplace - is "as disastrous as communism." For decades, any episode of turbulence in the U.S. stock market or speculative finance sector was bound to provoke scorn across France's political spectrum. Detractors disparaged the U.S. economic model for rewarding short-sighted greed with indecent executive compensation, for its myopic focus on share price rather than wider-view company performance...
...French companies on France's CAC 40 exchange posted cumulative profits last year of $133 billion, attesting to the efficient, globalized nature of the nation's businesses. When it emerged last January that accused rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel had allegedly cost his employer, Société Générale, $6.86 billion for uncovered transactions, more than just a financial scandal was revealed. The case was also concrete proof, should any have been needed, that the French no longer matched their mythic status as a profit-eschewing, socially minded alternative...